OMTP Bondi

Have you heard about Bondi? It is OMTP‘s initiative to extend the mobile browser to provide AJAX-like capabilities and access to local functionality on the handset.

From the OMTP website:

The OMTP BONDI initiative is addressing the problem that an application written for one phone must be rewritten again and again if it is to work on all phones. This is the mobile platform fragmentation problem. The cost to the mobile industry of this inefficiency is huge. It slows down time to market, limits market size and increases customer confusion; hence impedes uptake of services.

OMTP seeks to remedy this problem by helping to address the way in which the existing web 2.0 environment is moved onto mobile devices. Mobile devices offer new capabilities to web service developers which make them very desirable, but present new security issues. OMTP is defining the key interfaces that enable the mobile web platform to access sensitive functions on the mobile device. OMTP is defining appropriate security that will enable new services and create user trust.

It is very cool to see this initiative happening, as this is in part the result of a study performed earlier this year for the OMTP by Ajit, Tony Fish, and others, including myself, and with input from Industry experts who were interviewed including James Pearce, Barbara Ballard, Tom Hume, Paul Golding, Mike Rowehl, Thomas Landspurg, Jason Delport, Brian Lee, and many others. I think of the study as a success, and a goldmine of captured knowledge, and seeing Bondi is great…

As expected, the top concern with Bondi is security — from the OMTP says mobile Web 2.0 is a beach (The Register) article:

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Bondi working group, who will be deciding how much freedom is too much for untrusted applications, and how to identify those applications that deserve a little more trust. Apparently digital signatures will be on the agenda, but accompanied by the domain listing approach, where access to the APIs is restricted to scripts loaded from known sites.

So I’m looking forward to see how they will solve that security problem — best answer, let the user decide! Prompt the user for permission, and go…

If this OMTP project is successful, we will be MUCH closer to next level of mobile applications based on Web Runtimes — see Mobile Internet Programming: Browser, Web Runtime, Local-based Applications.

ceo